'Submarine' review: Misfit teen finds the road to romance to be a rocky one

He worries that his parents are breaking up, and that his mother is having an affair. He worries that the wonderful Jordana Bevan will never go out with him (and, once she does go out with him, will dump him). Mostly, he just worries.

"Submarine" -- opening for a weeklong run Friday (Aug. 19) at the Chalmette Movies -- is the story of his anguish.

It is also, however, a teen comedy -- a sort of funky Welsh "Rushmore." Another neurotic, hypereducated misfit, Oliver reads Jung, Nietzsche and "The Catcher in the Rye." His idea of a fun date is to catch a matinee of "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

Is it any wonder he has a picture of Woody Allen next to his bed?

Luckily for us, director Richard Ayoade has two good young performers in Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige, who play Oliver and Jordana, and great adult ones in Sally Hawkins and Paddy Considine, who play Oliver's mother and her possible lover.

The very funny Hawkins keeps her natural bubbliness tamped down under a firmly sprayed hairdo and a proper sense of decorum -- both things, you soon sense, she'd like to lose. And Considine is terrific as Graham T. Purvis, a New Age charlatan with the Mullet From Hell.

Craig Roberts stars 'Submarine.'

Ayoade comes out of music videos, and that contributes to a weakness in the storytelling. There are two sequences built around songs that really feel like padding; he also has a tendency to bring up ideas and then not develop them.

The script, for example, introduces the rather sad character of a bullied girl -- then drops her. She's served her purpose in the plot, of course; it's by joining forces against her that Oliver and Jordana bond. But you do wonder what happened to her. And you wonder if Oliver will ever wonder just what kind of girl Jordana really is.

He doesn't, though, as this seemingly unconventional movie ends up playing out as a conventional romance. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl -- you know the rest.

But what is a surprise here is the intensity of the young actors -- Roberts has a particularly perfect scowl -- and the freshness of the Welsh seaside scenery. And the playfulness of the direction, which skips amusingly back and forth in time and provides a doozy of a wish-fulfillment fantasy obit for Oliver.

Those pleasures more than overcome the film's few missteps and missed opportunities. And help drive a teen comedy that, in the end, is really rather grown-up